Build a More Up-to-Date Vista with the Integration Menu

If you've been in the habit of running, rather than downloading hotfixes and drivers for installation later, vLite gives you a really good reason to mend your ways.

Customize (and Shrink!) Vista with Components

When you select the Components category, the Compatibility Features dialog opens first. Select the components you want in the optimized image. Click each option to see which features are included. Because some components have feature overlap with others, you may be able to skip installing some features without losing functionality you need.

Click the Compatibility Applications tab to select support for Halo 2, Paint.NET, and other popular Vista programs.

Next, the main Components menu opens. Unlike the pop-up compatibility window, the Components menu is used to remove components in the following categories:

Accessories

Drivers

Games

Hardware Support

Languages (Asian)

Multimedia

Network Services

System

As you make selections, keep an eye on the right pane, which lists the size of each component, what it's used for, and when to keep it. Items listed in Red can cause problems if they are removed. I removed 60 components, including the entire Printers category (I prefer to download customized drivers, and I just don't need dozens of old drivers for printers I'll never see cluttering up my system). As you will see later, it makes a difference in the size of the install image.

Apply Your Changes and Watch Vista Shrink

After making changes on these menus, click Apply, and choose what changes you want to make to the image. To create the smallest image, select the version you specified when you started the process. At the end of the process, you will have an optimized image ready to create an ISO image or bootable disc.

Creating the ISO - How Small Can You Go?

The ISO menu provides options for creating the image, burning it directly to a disc, splitting it across multiple discs, and configuring advanced options. My (rather modest) changes reduced the size of the Vista image to 1.8GB, down from 2.6GB. If you target a less-feature rich version of Vista and strip out more components, you can create a much smaller image. The Computerworld story I cited at the beginning of this article reports that one user crunched Vista Home Basic down to a 525MB ISO file (small enough to fit on a CD) that created a 1.3GB installation! See this forum thread for various user reports.

Vista SP1 and vLite

Before you perform your next (or first) Vista installation, take a look at vLite. Keep in mind, though, that a vLite-customized version of Vista isn't compatible with SP1. However, once SP1 starts showing up in DVD form, you'll be able to use vLite to customize and reduce it in size as much (or as little) as you want.

I'll give nLite a spin at integrating SP3 into Windows XP SP2 when it's available as a final product. Thanks for asking.
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